Core decks vs extensive reading

(2016-06-09, 12:04 am)sholum Wrote: I forgot who I heard this from (on this site), but Anki is a tool that increases your familiarity with words, making it easier to remember them, but you won't really learn a lot of them until you use them (by reading, for instance).

This is very important. Anki does increase one's familiarity with words. But when they get pushed out to one or two years because you "know" them, if you don't encounter them at any time during the interval you are as likely as not to have forgotten them when they finally come back.

But then if you haven't used them actively or passively in two years, why does it even matter to know them? There's always a dictionary for the clearly very rare occasion when you need them.

Anki and "learning" is not an end in itself. At least it isn't for me.

Also the fact that you won't really learn them until you use them goes deeper than the mere mechanical fact of whether you remember their definitions or not.

Just knowing the dictionary definition or an example sentence or two is not "knowing a word" in any real sense. It is only by having it as part of one's real-life vocabulary (active or passive) that one actually knows it in the way that one knows a word in one's own language - i.e. feels its weight and nuance and knows it as a living part of a living and experienced language.